Congressman Gets 5 Years

Judge Lambastes Reynolds

With those words, Criminal Judge Fred Suria Jr. sentenced a still defiant U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds to 5 years in prison Thursday for having sex with a 16-year-old girl and trying to sabotage the case against him.

"You had a job for life," Suria declared. "You could have done all these things. What did you do? You blew it . . . You threw it all away."

After a sentencing hearing that lasted more than four hours, Suria imposed a shorter prison term than Reynolds and his defense team had anticipated and ordered Reynolds to surrender to prison authorities at 9:30 a.m. next Thursday. The prosecution had asked for 15 years in prison.

The sentence-4 years for a charge of criminal sexual assault to be followed by a year for obstruction of justice-came after Reynolds, 43, rose and addressed Suria and the packed courtroom in a 47-minute speech where he blamed his predicament on the "animals" in the media, a vindictive prosecutor and racism in general.

He blamed himself for bringing shame to his wife and his mother, but continued to deny that he ever had sex with Beverly Heard or that he ever tried to obstruct justice.

In asking for a longer prison term, lead prosecutor Andrea Zopp had warned Suria earlier in the proceeding that Reynolds would attempt to shift the blame to others.

"He has a complete inability to take responsibility for his own conduct," said Zopp, angrily pacing in front of Suria. "It doesn't matter who gets hurt. What's important is that he doesn't have to answer for what he did. He'd use anybody he could, as long as he didn't have to answer for his conduct. Using anything and anybody who got in his way."

Reynolds began his statement with a recitation of his mercurial rise from a childhood of poverty in Mound Bayou, Miss., to a seat in Congress.

"I'm proud of my life in its totality," he declared. "I'm not proud of the weakness I exhibited in this case. I am deeply sorry for letting people down.

"I'm going to stand with my family, and my family is going to stand with me," he continued.

From the third row of the courtroom, came the sharp words of his wife, Marisol. "All right," she snapped.

Without a blink, Reynolds thundered on, as if he were on the floor of Congress instead of in a criminal courtoom.

"When they shackle me like they shackled my slave ancestors and take me off to jail," he declared as his gaze swept across the prosecutors' table and the crowded gallery, "nobody in this room will see me crawl. Ever."

It was a day that overflowed with rhetoric, as prosecutor Zopp unleashed a fury born of more than a year's work on a pressure-cooker of a case.

She dismissed the notion that Reynolds should be excused from his conduct because Heard, the now 19-year-old woman who came to authorities in June 1994 to say she had a sexual relationship with Reynolds when she was 16, had been promiscuous before meeting the congressman.

"She could be the most sexually active teenager in Chicago, Cook County," Zopp said. "But it doesn't make it right. It's irrelevant. What's relevant is what he did.

"He preyed on the fact that she was messed up, that she was open to the idea of sex . . . He turned her into a hooker, judge. He had her in his office, handing her money, parading her around in lingerie."

"This man has a sexual interest in teenagers," Zopp said. "That's what the evidence showed, and he will do it again. It's him-he's the problem."

"You have to say to this defendant and to this community: `This is wrong. It's terribly wrong.' "

But Reynolds, who has said he will resign from the House of Representatives effective Sunday, delivered an arm-waving tirade, in which he again refused to admit any criminal wrongdoing.

He ripped State's Atty. Jack O'Malley for unfairly prosecuting him, trying to make a comparison between the handling of his case with that of Gregory Becker, a white police officer indicted Wednesday on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a homeless black man.

According to Reynolds, the fact that he had no preliminary hearing before a judge before he was indicted while Becker did, demonstrated that his race was a prime factor in his case.

"You're in a fool's paradise if you think race doesn't play a role in this prosecution, because it does," Reynolds said.

The claim brought a sharp dissent from Suria. "No matter who we are or where we live, there is bias and prejudice," the judge said. "We in the U.S. have played the race card so often that people believe race is the sole reason for bias and prejudice.

"It is not.

"This case is not about race. This case is not about politics. This case is about whether or not a defendant committed a crime," Suria said. "It does so happen that the defendant is black. It does so happen that the prosecutor (Zopp) is black. It does so happen that the victim is black.

"What does matter in this court is whether or not the crime has been committed."